


To Love Something Dark

by evilgrrl



Series: The Shadow and the Soul [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Inspired by Poetry, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Psychology, character portrait, psychological portrait
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 20:01:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15781086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evilgrrl/pseuds/evilgrrl
Summary: “I love you, as certain dark things are to be loved. In secret, between the shadow and the soul.” - Pablo Naruda~ ~ ~Rey had wanted to take Ben's hand when he offered it to her, surrounded by the bodies of the Praetorian Guard in Snoke's Throne Room, but she couldn't. Not as long as it meant leaving her friends in the Resistance to die.Ben had told her that she was still holding on, that she should let go, but *he* was the one who wasn't willing to let go of the past. He felt like he had invested too much in the First Order to let it go and try something different.Rey couldn't save him. She had to hope he would just realize the truth and save himself.





	To Love Something Dark

To Love Something Dark

 

“I love you, as certain dark things are to be loved. In secret, between the shadow and the soul.” - Pablo Naruda

 

Rey loved the Darkness, though she knew she shouldn't. 

Her intellectual understanding of the Force was not sophisticated. She had not been trained long enough for that. Her instinctual grasp of the Force, on the other hand, was phenomenal. 

It was confusing to her that Master Skywalker had counseled her so strongly against even looking at the Dark side. Rey felt a call to both the Light and the Dark in her heart. She understood that one could not exist without the other. She also knew that fearing the Dark was giving into it, because fear itself was a Dark emotion. 

Rey knew you should respect the Dark side, understand that the power it gave you was limited and came with all kinds of strings attached, but that it was power nonetheless, and sometimes it was necessary to use it. Refusing to consider it didn't change that.

Sometimes Rey thought that Luke was afraid to observe the Dark side because he had given in to it, in the form of anger, at least twice. He had told her about how he had started to go down the Dark path when he was fighting his father, Darth Vader. Vader had antagonized Luke as they dueled, and Luke had succumbed to anger and struck at his father. Then he had come to his senses and refused to fight. That had ultimately led to Vader turning back to the Light as he lay dying in his son's arms. 

The other incident had not produced such a happy outcome. Luke had stood over his nephew Ben Solo's bed as he slept, trying to examine his psyche to see if he had fallen to the Dark side yet. When he saw the amount of Darkness in Ben's mind, he had taken out his light saber and considered killing him. The horror in his own angry thoughts woke Ben up. Luke's anxious misgivings of a future in which Ben Solo killed everything he loved had overwhelmed him.

Luke told Rey he had tried to take it back, tried to put the weapon down and called out for Ben to stop. He had tried to prevent his vision of Ben turning Dark from coming true, and accidentally set it in motion. He had frightened the sleeping boy into raising his own lightsaber, then pulling down the stones of the roof onto his master. Would Ben have become Kylo Ren if Luke had not given in to his foreboding? It was impossible to know, but Rey thought maybe it would not have happened. It would not have happened by Luke’s hand then, in any case. 

Rey did not fear the Dark, not in herself and not in others. Kylo was a Dark thing, and she loved him. But that was not all he was. She knew he was a creature of balance, like herself, and that he had been violently steered toward the Dark side by Snoke despite how hard Luke had fought to keep him away from it. 

Rey thought that love should be an emotion of the Light, because it should be selfless. She was confused, then, as to why the Jedi masters taught their disciples to reject it. Rey wasn't sure her love for Kylo qualified as something Light using any philosophy.

Love should be out in the open. She didn't want to keep her feelings for Kylo a secret from her friends, but she knew it was necessary. She did not, however, keep it a secret from herself. She had grown up alone, away from the influence of polite society, and had come to terms with a lot of her less-than-noble impulses and emotions. 

Rey was not sure, however, if it was Kylo himself that she loved, or Ben Solo. Kylo said that he had destroyed Ben Solo, but Rey didn't believe it. The question became: was Kylo Ren a persona constructed around the broken boy, Ben Solo, as Luke had thought? Or were they simply two sides of the same person? Rey thought Kylo Ren was a construct, and could be discarded once Ben felt safe. She wasn't sure if she could live with the knowledge that Kylo and Ben were the same person. 

Kylo Ren was stronger in the Force than any other being she had encountered outside of Snoke himself. He had a standing military and an iron grip on the galaxy. Everyone considered him hateful and evil; everyone except Rey.

Just thinking about him was painful. Was love supposed to feel like this? She had only loved her parents before, so she didn't know what love felt like. She didn't want it to be so complicated and difficult. But so many things weren't the way she wanted them to be. Why should this be any different?

Loving her family had been painful. Eventually, of course, Kylo had forced her to face the truth that loving them wasn't what had been so hurtful. What was agonizing was facing the fact that they did not exist at all. The version of her mom and dad that lived in her head – that she had constructed to mask the truth from herself -- was revealed to be just a fantasy. 

Her real biological parents had sold her for drinking money or something equivalent. Maybe she had loved them, but they had not loved her back, at least not enough to return for her when they were finished drinking. Maybe they had never finished drinking. Or maybe it was as Kylo had proposed, that they were buried in an unmarked grave in the desert. In any case, one thing was certain: believing her parents were coming back was a lie.

In some ways, though, Rey's love for her parents had helped her survive, protected her from the painful reality of her abandonment. She had lived for their return and endured many hardships to be reunited with them. Essentially, the idea that they would return for her was a kind illusion she had created to keep herself from giving up hope. A compassionate adult might have done the same, had she known any at the time.

Now Rey was trying to forgive her parents, but it wasn't easy. In order to forgive them, she had to process the misery of being abandoned. She had to open herself up to feeling the heartbreak she had kept at bay for so long, and she was afraid it would break her apart.

Her unexamined belief was that if her own parents didn't love her, she must be unlovable. It was an existential assumption she shared with Ben Solo, one of the many things they seemingly had in common.

On top of the rejection, she had to live with the shameful fact that she had deceived herself for so long. Rey was coming to realize, however, that she had done the best she could under the circumstances, difficult as they were. She had been a small child alone. If she had told herself a fairy story to cope, then it was understandable, forgivable. 

If fantasizing about her parents had allowed her to feel the love she needed in order to keep living, then perhaps the pleasant falsehood she had created for herself had been necessary, commendable even. 

Had her parents done the best they could too, then, under the circumstances? She wasn't absolving them of their responsibilities or their failures though, merely trying to understand the reasons for their actions. 

They could have used birth control to prevent burdening themselves with a helpless creature that had required constant care. They could have found a guardian less predatory than Unkar Plutt. They could have used some of that drinking money to hire someone to take her off world. 

In her darker moments, Rey thought that maybe her parents were actually dead by their own hands. Maybe resisting the urge to take her with them had been the best they could do. 

It was even possible that they really had meant to come back, but had been prevented. As an adult, Rey believed that was the least likely scenario. 

Hating and resenting them now didn't do Rey any good though. So, she forgave them as much as she could, and let them go. 

Kylo probably would have approved of letting go of them, if not the part about forgiveness. The last time Rey had been with him, he told her that it was time to release the past. She acknowledged a certain wisdom to that, but thought he was wrong in his approach. Kylo's idea of letting go of the past was strangling it until its dead carcass could be flung away. 

You didn't release the past because you hated it, though. You released it because it was past, over with. Letting go wasn't about resentment and bitterness. In fact, it required lightness, a willingness to open your hand and your heart and let the things that had been weighing them down float away on a cool breeze. Nothing had to die or be killed. 

The only thing you needed to release were old emotions, old hopes and memories that had been a survival mechanism and that were no longer necessary.

That was a lesson Rey had learned a long time ago, out in that wrecked AT-AT she had made into her home on Jakku; the lesson that hatred and grief were their own punishment. 

Rey wondered if it would be possible for Kylo to release his own past. In some ways, his life had been even harder than hers. She would not have thought that possible before she had seen into his mind, but now she could tell simply by the way he behaved. His unprovoked fits of rage. The low self-esteem which led him to puff up his ego in an attempt to fake it. The silent self-talk he engaged in when he was alone, comforting himself, encouraging himself, trying to provide himself with the support that no one else gave him. 

Other people saw riches and privilege when they looked at Ben Solo. Rey saw the loneliness of a little boy whose parents were busy – too busy desperately trying to keep democracy alive and fascism at bay --- to give him the attention and guidance such a strange, troubled child needed. She saw a kid whose parents tried to substitute money for affection and failed miserably. 

Ben's classmates had seen an entitled brat who had the favor of their Master, not because of anything he had done to deserve it, but because they were related. Rey knew Kylo believed that he had been exiled because his parents feared him, didn't want him, didn't love him. He himself thought of his “special relationship” with Luke as one between a convict and his jailer.

Snoke had recognized Ben's potential for greatness, the mighty Skywalker bloodline that could make him into the deadliest tool in Snoke's arsenal. Rey saw the shell of a boy who thought he could never live up to his parents' and the galaxy's expectations. She thought that the trappings of power and prestige were just that: a trap ensnaring him into a life of isolation and responsibilities that were impossible to fulfill. 

People's expectations of his potential had prevented him from having a normal childhood, normal relationships, normal enjoyment of everyday pleasures. He did not even have the freedom to think his own thoughts without intrusion from Snoke. Ben would have had a much better chance at happiness if he had been a regular person with a normal life. Under the mundane circumstances of life, he might have come to value himself and his abilities for what they were.

With the right amount of support and encouragement, Ben could have grown into the natural leader he would have been without the legend of Leia Organa to live up to. He could have developed the everyday confidence of a man who knows he is capable of coping with life's challenges. 

It's possible he would have even become a Jedi if he hadn't needed to live up to the legend of Luke Skywalker. Even the Dark side of his family's history placed undue pressure on him, since he couldn't compete with his infamous grandfather. Wherever Ben tried to turn, he was overshadowed by his family’s accomplishments. 

Rey understood why people envied him. His life looked great from the outside, as if everything had been handed to him on a silver tray. They didn't know how problematic his childhood had been, even with parents who were considered heroes. They didn't know about the coffee droid that had tried to kill him as a toddler. They couldn't fathom his bewilderment when his Force sensitivity had manifested early, or how much it alarmed his parents. Least of all could they know about Snoke's influence on his developing personality when he had been growing up. 

Snoke had whispered in Ben's ear from the time he was born. Having an invisible friend in childhood was not unusual. Having one who undermined your family's stability and your own ability to develop normally was not. 

Snoke had been following the Skywalker family for many years as he strategized about bringing them down or harnessing their power. He had sensed Ben Solo since he was in his mother's womb, and began communicating with him using the Force as soon as the child became verbal. 

Snoke had used the Force, as well as his extensive research into the Skywalker family, to mentally prepare Ben to break from his family and become Snoke's apprentice. 

As far as Rey knew, the kind of mental communications Snoke had employed with Ben had never before been documented, so his parents were not even aware that such a threat existed. They hadn't been bad parents, but they had not been able to protect him.

If Snoke had tried to approach Ben Solo in person, his parents would have been alerted. House security and droids had kept him under supervision most of the time after the unfortunate event with the coffee droid. A corporeal being would not have stood a chance. 

And if Snoke had appeared to Ben in some way, in something similar to a hologram, or through some physical means of communication, Ben would have told his parents, of course. 

As far as Ben could remember, though, he'd always had someone talking in his head, someone who had kept him company when his parents were out or busy. Someone who had sympathized when Ben was sick or had been punished for misbehaving. 

Snoke spent years earning Ben's trust with friendship and support. He always took Ben's side in any conflict, and he understood how unjust parents could be. With the exception of interpreting Han and Leia's behavior in the most unloving light possible, he told the boy what he wanted to hear, about how strong and smart and special he was, about how a great destiny awaited him. 

Ben had been amazed at the unpleasant way Snoke's predictions had of coming true. Being a child, he could not see how Snoke's observations of humanity through the years had enabled him to anticipate how people would act and what the results of their actions would be. 

Ben was not aware of how influential Snoke's interpretations and analysis were in the shaping of his own character and behavior. Snoke had many ways of shepherding Ben Solo toward the Dark side. 

So, Rey did not envy Kylo. If Snoke's influence went along with all his wealth and privilege, she would not have traded places with him for anything.

Rey's childhood had been extremely brutal, but she had turned out better for it through her own personality and fortitude. She was just as strong with the Force as Ben was, but unlike him, Rey had been forced to discipline herself or die on Jakku. If you didn't ration your water, you would die. If you didn't go out and scavenge every day, you wouldn't eat. If you didn't practice self-defense regularly, someone would kill you. She had learned some hard lessons she wasn't sure Kylo ever would and she was stronger for it. 

On the other hand, Rey was aware of how she coveted much of what Kylo had. She had no family at all, and he had a number of people who loved him. She'd grown up with only what she could salvage from other people's trash. He'd had the best education available, whereas she was almost entirely self-taught. He'd traveled and received Jedi training, when she had been stuck in the sand box of Jakku, and only had two lessons with the same Master Ben had spent years with. 

The advantages he'd had over her initially had equalized somewhat when Kylo had tried to interrogate her and she'd turned the tables on him. She hadn't known what she was doing at the time, but she used so much power trying to shut out Kylo's probe that she had reversed the polarity somehow, and entered his mind instead. 

Suddenly Rey had access to many of Kylo's memories, thoughts and emotions, even if she didn't have the skill to decipher them. The best thing, however, was how much of his Jedi training had been downloaded into her mind. 

Rey had always been able to take care of herself. She had practiced long hours with her staff to defend herself on Jakku, but she had been largely self-taught. Now she had much more access to the traditional training and skills a Jedi padawan would have acquired. 

That “download” had been particularly valuable during their fight on Starkiller Base. She had drawn a blaster when she and Finn saw him in the forest, and Kylo used the Force to slam her into a tree. 

Rey had awoken to Finn's screams. Kylo was using the Force to reach for Luke's lightsaber, which Finn had lost in the snow. Rey had called to it, and it had bypassed Kylo, obeying her call instead of his. She ignited it and went after him. 

At first, he had merely defended. She had attacked him ferociously, however, believing she was fighting for her life as well as Finn's. When he saw how strong she was, he not only started attacking her, but he had given chase as well. Trees and branches had fallen all around them due to the blows from their lightsabers. Soon Rey discovered that they were not causing all the havoc around them. The earth itself was shaking, felling trees as well. The weapon had been activated and Starkiller Base was tearing itself apart.

Kylo had advanced on Rey until a huge chasm opened up behind her. He backed her up to it and she'd been terrified he would chase her over it. He had simply crossed swords with her, however, and pushed no further. 

In hindsight, Rey suspected he had been as interested in talking to her as he had been in retrieving his grandfather's lightsaber. He told her she needed a teacher and said he could show her the ways of the Force. She had been stunned to realize he was offering to be her mentor here and now if she would give up this battle. He had tried to turn her to the Dark side as early as that. 

It did not have the desired effect. As soon as Kylo reminded her of the Force, she stopped, closed her eyes, and tapped into it. Rey used Kylo's own training against him, and allowed the Force to guide her actions. She darted around him as she broke his hold, and moved away from the chasm. 

In the time since that duel had happened, Rey had learned more about the ways of the Force - without Kylo Ren, thank you very much. She had come to the realization that she had been drawing on the Dark side of the Force then as well as the Light, using her anger, hatred and fear to go on the offensive. She'd been able to draw on both sides simultaneously. Was that supposed to be possible?

Rey had gotten a huge lift from the Force, just as Kylo lost his connection to it as well as his concentration. She attacked and slashed him down the face and shoulder as he fell. Had she intended to do that? The memory was slightly removed from her. 

She wasn't glad that she had disfigured him, but it seemed appropriate that she had left her mark on him. It seemed like she had sliced through his arrogant surface persona the way her saber had cut through his skin. 

Even now, after he'd presumably received the best medical treatment the First Order could supply, the jagged scar on his face was still noticeable. In her own mind, she wondered if perhaps it was a souvenir from the Force. 

Snoke has said that killing Han Solo had split Kylo's spirit to the bone, and she agrRey thinks about Kylo every day after Crait. And every night. He made her re-consider almost everything she thought she knew. She's faced her past and let go of the fantasy of reuniting with her parents. Now she's ready for the future, but it seems like Kylo is the one who can't let go. If he doesn't change, they can't be together. But he's got to want to do it for himself.eed that it had. But she thought her mark on him had something to do with it too. When she saw him after that, he'd been. . . different. He appeared less confident, less cocky, more human. He'd been so handsome before, but cold, without compassion. In their encounters through the bond, afterward, he'd seemed more frazzled, more vulnerable, less impressed with himself. Rey thought it was a change for the better. And they seemed to find themselves strangely attracted to each other. 

 

Rey often wondered if Ben Solo's fall to the Dark side been inevitable. 

Ben had been born in order to counter Luke's rising. After everything had gone so disastrously wrong at the Jedi Academy, Luke had closed himself off from the Force. So the Force had found Rey and worked its will on her. She and Kylo were meant to bring balance to the Force, choosing people who had the potential to make the relationship a union between equals, rather than one of master and apprentice. 

Ben's soul had been warped though, not just by the pain of his isolation and his wild talent with the Force, but by Snoke's psychic brainwashing. Sometimes Rey didn't know how Kylo had not been driven mad by it. Sometimes she thought he had been.

Under Snoke's influence, Kylo's empathy had shriveled up and almost died. Few people had been able to empathize with him when he was a child growing up, so he had few examples to follow. 

Kylo hadn't thought about other people's feelings in years. It wasn't until he met Rey, and saw the same emotions in her that he himself felt -- the loneliness, the isolation, the abandonment – and felt a spark of empathy.

Kylo had previously driven his own softer emotions underground, so he didn't recognize the burgeoning love Rey had for her friends in the Resistance. He saw only what they had in common, and how strong she was, how fierce. She was able to perceive his love for her, his care and desire, but he did not seem able to feel hers, or to recognize it for what it was, at the very least. 

If Rey hadn't already known Kylo was in love with her, she would have figured it out from what happened during the battle with the Praetorian Guards. They had started off together, acting as one being, before being split up and she started lagging. She wasn't strong enough or well-trained enough to defeat that many highly experienced soldiers herself. 

She tapped into the Force as far as she was able, then it occurred to her that if she could not coerce the Force to do her will, she could submit herself to it. In that moment, she again became a vessel of the Force itself, acting according to its will and not her own. 

The Mystical Force wanted to protect its creation – the two of them – and so had used her body to defeat the guards. Afterwards, when she returned to herself, she had felt jubilant. Snoke was dead and they had overcome the guards.

When Kylo had taken out the last one with Rey's help, he had looked at her as if she were the only thing that mattered and threw down his weapon. 

“The fleet,” she had called to him, remembering it as she turned and ran towards Snoke's Occulus Viewing Source. 

“Give the order for them to stop firing,” she pleaded, pointing to the screen where she could see the very First Order ship she was standing on still attacking the smaller shuttles. “There's still time to save the fleet.”

Then she noticed Kylo was no longer walking toward her. Instead he had turned, and stepped slowly toward the dais of Snoke's throne as if hypnotized. 

Rey's heart sank. She knew by the way he was staring at the throne that she had miscalculated, but she didn't want to believe it. She called his name softly, questioningly, hoping to wake him, or herself, from this dream. The adrenaline in her system left in a rush, leaving behind a sensation of disbelieving exhaustion. It was like a nightmare.

“It's time to let old things die,” he said, still breathing hard from the battle.

“Snoke,” he went on, turning toward her and approaching. “Skywalker. The Jedi. The Rebels. Let it all die.”

Kylo had called Rey's name softly. His face worked as he steeled himself to make his offer, then he held out a gloved hand to her, saying, “I want you to join me.” 

Under other circumstances, she would loved to have taken it. 

“We can rule together and bring a new order to the galaxy,” he appealed to her.

Rey was shaking her head in disagreement. Her voice was breaking as she asked him not to do this, and it wasn't only her voice. She literally thought she could feel her heart crack in two. 

This was it, then, his attempt to turn her to the Dark side. 

She thought she might be sick. The smoke and the smell of the burned bodies were making it hard for her to breathe. 

He lost his patience with her then, and yelled at her to stop holding on, misreading her desire to rescue the fleet as an unwillingness to let go of the past. 

She felt betrayed. How could he place his hunger for power over the lives of the people who had taken her in? She had thought he would help her, that he would turn if she had gone to him.

His timing, though, showed what he was willing to throw away -- her friends and his own mother – in order to consolidate his power, which was unacceptable to Rey. 

He seemed to think she was refusing him because she couldn't let go of the past. In an attempt to make her face reality, he changed the subject and calmly asked her if she wanted to know the truth about her parents. Her head swum at the conversation's change of direction, but she went with it. 

He dropped his hand, suggesting that maybe she had always known what had happened to her parents, but had refused to acknowledge it.

And he had been right. She needed to face it, and it was the hardest thing she had ever had to do.

Tears rolled down her cheeks unnoticed. 

“You know the truth,” he said gently as he came closer. “Say it.”

She admitted, out loud, that they had been nobody.

He had agreed, looking appalled that anyone could have done what they had, selling her off for drinking money. They were dead, he told her, in a pauper's grave, in the Jakku Dessert. And she knew it was true.

Her tears had been flowing freely by then. 

She had no place in this story. 

She came from nothing. 

She was nothing. 

She had to accept that she was alone and that no one loved her. 

So, she reached down within herself, and found the strength to not only look at it, but to hold it to herself and claim it.

She loved herself.

She would save herself. 

She didn't need anyone else. 

She was enough.

She meant something to Kylo too; she wasn't nothing to him. And she was able to enjoy that feeling for just a second: loving herself and having someone she cared about caring about her too. 

Then he had asked her again to join him, vulnerability naked on his face as he had whispered, “Please,” and she knew how much that word had cost him. He was making the most plainly vulnerable appeal to her that he was able to. 

And still she could not take it. 

She could not let everyone else she loved be wiped out if she had any way at all to prevent it. 

When she had sent herself to him on the Supremacy, she had thought that she would turn him by simply going to him. It would have been forgivable if she had lied to herself and believed that the real reason she had gone to Kylo was because she wanted to see him so desperately. It seemed less forgivable that she had fooled herself into believing that her desire for him to turn was really her longing to see him again, but she admitted it to herself now. 

She realized how impossible it would have been for her to turn him. He had to want to turn for himself, not in order to be with her.

Then she had made the impulsive decision to call to the lightsaber instead of taking Ben's hand. She admitted to herself that one of her reasons for reaching for the lightsaber was possibly self-defense. She also had the instinct to protect it as an artifact of the Light. 

Rey knew Kylo did not intend to hurt her. But he had kidnapped her and interrogated her before, against her will. She had to assume he might be willing to do the same to keep her with him. 

She shouldn't have reached for the saber though. It had been his grandfather's, and should have been his.

When Kylo saw what she had done, he too tried to bring the lightsaber to himself using the Force, and a tug of war started. When they both exerted their full will to bring the lightsaber to themselves, the Force had pushed them away from each other. It wanted to prevent them from harming each other, at all costs, even if it meant tearing the light saber itself apart. Indeed, the crystal in the lightsaber itself had sheared apart, creating the explosion that had caused them to black out.

She should have just let him keep the damned thing and made her getaway. Would he have allowed her to escape them? If he had Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber in his hand at the time, maybe he would have. 

After she had come to from the explosion, she had stood over Kylo, the way his uncle had stood over him at the academy. Rey set aside her personal feelings again. She was at a nexus for many different futures, and what she decided to do now would affect thousands, maybe millions, of lives. She realized that the decision was not hers to make.

Having recently turned herself over to the will of the Cosmic Force, Rey had a better understanding that Kylo was its instrument just as much as she was, despite his determination to bend it to his will. The Force was not finished with him. Relieved that it was not her responsibility to kill him, she wished him well, launched Snoke's escape shuttle, and contacted Chewie.

In her heart of hearts, Rey hoped that perhaps the Force would help her draw Ben back to the Light, but it wasn't her decision. She did love him, but had finally resigned herself to not being with him, not while he still belonged to the Dark. 

It was ironic that really it was Ben who needed to let go of the past. He told her to forget about the old-world order, but he was still mentally shackled to his crippled emotions, his habits and ways of thinking. 

Ben was still unable to make the changes real growth required. He had forced her own evolution, but had not been able to do the same for himself. Somewhere Rey had heard a saying that went something like it was easy to get rid of your own physical chains, but unchaining your mind was the hard part. 

Rey knew he loved her as much as he was capable. He had made her safety his priority when they had been fighting the guards. He had even come to her defense at the expense of his own, requiring her to throw him the lightsaber so he could save himself. He had actually killed Snoke for her, which he had been unable to do for his own welfare. Even his attempt at making her understand how she had come from nothing had also been his clumsy way of telling her he loved her. This was as close as he could come to vulnerability with someone else, admitting that he wanted and needed her with him. It was more than he had done for years, and it humbled him a little, which wasn't actually bad.

In truth, Kylo had thought their relationship was based only on romantic love, the kind of love only two people share. He had not understood that it was more than a personal love match, but something that the Force had created by necessity, to bring them together, for the entire galaxy, not just for themselves. His offer, as awkward and selfish as it had been, had been genuine.

* * *

Rescuing the Resistance survivors of the Battle of Crait seem unreal. She was so happy to see everyone, especially Finn and Leia, but it was so horrible to hear their stories about what had happened.

Somehow Luke had saved them. But what he had done with Kylo almost defied rational expectations. He battled his nephew and won without ever landing a blow.

From what Rey could gather, Luke had never actually left Ahch-To. Perhaps Leia had known it was a Force projection, but everyone else – Kylo included – had been shocked. 

Rey herself thought it was an ingenious solution.

She knew that Luke had gone to Ahch-to when he had realized that the galaxy wanted him to bring back the Jedi. In Luke's mind, the Jedi had only contributed to the problems of the universe. He had concluded that the best thing he could do – the most selfless thing – would be to allow the Jedi order to die with him. 

That meant isolating himself, destroying his only way off the island, and ignoring the cries of help from his friends and family. If the Jedi returned, it would enable to Sith to rise up again, which would only lead to more misery. 

Apparently he had changed his mind though. In this case, he had to sacrifice his own beliefs about what would be best for everyone, and instead be what Rey – and the galaxy – needed him to be. He had to forswear his own ideals and again take on that mantle of myth, and be the legendary Luke Skywalker they required. 

Luke needed to create a spectacle that would light the fire of the rebellion again, but he was not willing to do it at the expense of his nephew, who still thought Luke had tried to murder him. Kylo had never realized that Luke had given in to a momentary panic which he would have quickly overcome had Ben not woken up when he did. 

If Luke had shown up in person on Crait, he would have been forced into fighting Kylo, and that was the last thing he wanted to do. Sending himself as a projection was the perfect solution. It had allowed Kylo to act out his anger toward his uncle and hopefully achieve some kind of catharsis. It did not allow for the possibility of Kylo actually killing him, which would only add the tremendous amount of guilt he already carried, whether he acknowledged it or not. 

Maybe someday Kylo would realize that Luke's final act had been one of love and atonement. After he had enabled Leia's people to escape, he was free to let go and become one with the Force. 

Rey loved hearing about Luke's final sacrifice, even as she mourned him. What hurt was hearing about Kylo Ren. All the survivors hated him.

Rey remembered hating Kylo too, once upon a time, before she saw the pain and anger at himself that he hid from everyone. Knowing how much hurt he was feeling distressed her, but she could see no way to help him. She couldn't do his emotional work for him, and he had chosen the throne over her. He had to want to change, and he didn't seem to want to. 

When all the escapees had finally been loaded onto the freighter, and Rey was closing the door to the Millennium Falcon in preparation for flight, she saw him again. 

The strange, but by now familiar silence descended around Rey, cutting her off from everyone else. She saw Kylo alone, kneeling with his cape wrapped around him. Something glinted in his gloved hand. 

Then he had looked up at her, and she knew he could see her too. He seemed calm, but she sensed waves of anguish and despair coming from him. He looked so forlorn and hopeless that she was tempted to try to speak to him again, but resisted.

She finally realized that the pain she felt about loving Kylo was not the love itself, but their separation and alienation from each other. All she could do was close the bond and wait.


End file.
